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1929 is a year that most of our grandparents or great-grandparents can still recall quite clearly, as it was a year when one of the most noteworthy events occurred in the history of the United States and which affected several other nations on the globe. It was the year the Great Depression began. This disastrous event in our history happened at a time when businesses operated under a laissez-faire regime and markets were independent of government intervention. The inequality of income and wealth increased, and barely any adjustment by the Federal Reserve was made regarding the money supply. Certainly these factors are among the leading causes of the Great Depression. Causes such as false prosperity, the stock market crash, the banking crisis, unemployment and the trade collapse are imperative for understanding such a historical event. False prosperity prior to the Great Depression referred to a false sense of the economy booming.

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Marcel Haar, MA., was born 1985 in Vienna. After finishing school at the Lycée Fran‡ais de Vienna, he studied Banking and Financing at the BFI in Vienna. His career thus began in a bank, but became pretty quickly a change to the world of IT, where he has for some years taken root.

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